TAUNTON — Cory and Patricia Cronin are grieving for their daughter, Melisa Patnaude, who was 36 when she died from a heroin overdose early Wednesday morning.

“I lost my daughter today, please stop,” was the message Patricia Cronin said she posted on her Facebook page.

Patnaude was declared dead at Morton Hospital after losing consciousness in a third-floor apartment at 9 Taunton Green — a narrow, three-story building downtown that police said has become a regular location for repeat heroin overdose calls.

Patnaude overdosed just over a week ago in the same apartment. Police said it took three vials of the antidote Narcan to revive her.

According to police, Patnaude was also arrested in February on charges of heroin possession hours after she was found unconscious with a needle in her arm in a bathroom at nearby School Street Apartments.

Her parents, who are both 57, said they also lost a 34-year-old daughter in 2013 when she overdosed on pills in Fall River. They said their younger daughter became addicted to prescription painkillers because of bad knees and back surgery.

Patnaude’s death brings the number of people who police say have died from heroin overdoses in Taunton since the beginning of the year to eight. The cumulative number of overdoses now stands at 124.

The Cronins said Melisa fell in with the wrong crowd, which led to heroin addiction. They also said she did everything she could to avoid going through rehab programs.

“I pleaded with the judge not to let her walk. They were going to release her, and I knew she was going to die,” Cory Cronin said, referring to Melisa’s arraignment for the heroin possession charge.

He said Melisa even told the judge that he wasn’t her father so that she could be released. It turns out, he said, that she was committed to a 21-day program in New Bedford.

Cory Cronin said Melisa had a chance to attend another program at a different rehabilitation facility, but refused because they wouldn’t allow her to smoke.

“It was an excuse. She fooled me,” he said. “She sat next to me and said she never stuck a needle into her arm, that she loved me and was going to get a job.”

The Cronins also have a 33-year-old son doing time for attempted manslaughter. They say he stabbed another man who had physically abused their now deceased younger daughter.

Cronin and his wife said heroin junkies in Taunton have been playing the system for far too long.

“They know they can go on disability and apply for food stamps,” Cory Cronin said.

Cronin said he speaks from experience. He said he was addicted to heroin in the late 1970s and managed to keep it a secret from his wife and employer for 10 years.

Page 2 of 3 - Before becoming a heroin addict, Cronin said he started taking prescription Percocets after his leg was run over by a car. When the Percocet stopped working, he switched to black-market Dilaudid, which he eventually crushed up to snort and inject. When the pain persisted, he said he switched to heroin.

“It was the next step,” he said.

His wife said during that time, she also indulged in recreational use of drugs, but not heroin.

Cory Cronin said heroin addicts nowadays are their own worst enemies. He said they know the cheap heroin on the street is oftentimes cut with the painkiller fentanyl.

He also said they have the added security of knowing that they likely will be revived by emergency responders using Narcan if they take too much and overdose.

Cronin said he didn’t need any professional counseling in the 1980s when he decided to quit cold turkey.

“It was time,” he said.

The Cronins said heroin dealers and users in Taunton have also become comfortable using EBT food stamp cards as currency.

“They know the right people. They sell it for half what it’s worth to buy drugs,” Patricia Cronin said.

The Cronins said Melisa had been living with a middle-aged man renting the 9 Taunton Green apartment for at least a few months. They said the man called them just after 6 a.m. to say that she had died from an overdose.

Gunnar Hexum said he has owned 9 Taunton Green since 2006. Since 1996, he also has run the Massachusetts School of Information Technology, a computer-course facility located in an attached building.

Hexum said the resident with whom Patnaude was living may have developmental disabilities and doesn’t seem to be getting the steady supervision he needs.

He said the man has been taken advantage of on a continual basis — mainly by women, but also some men — who make up the local “homeless and drug-addled community,” who know they can talk him into letting them use his apartment as a place to shoot up and crash.

Hexum said he’s now in the process of evicting a second individual who has a history of drug arrests. But he said his hands are tied when it comes to tossing troublemakers out because of landlord/tenant laws.

“It’s time Mr. Hexum took responsibility for his tenants,” Hoye said, adding that “the entire building has been a problem and a drain on resources.”

The mayor said his office has received complaints from other downtown businesses and residents about 9 Taunton Green. He also said he will ask the board of health and building department to investigate whether the apartment units there are legitimately habitable.

Page 3 of 3 - Hexum said his condolences go out to the Cronin family. But he also said he believes addicts have a responsibility to themselves as well.

“Addiction is a tragedy, but the onus is on the addict,” Hexum said. “The individual has the responsibility of seeking treatment, or the consequences can be extreme, which is what we’ve seen this morning.”

Cory Cronin said he wasn’t entirely shocked when he got the news that his daughter had died.

“I knew it was coming sooner or later,” he said.

As for heroin and the men and women who seek its pleasures and escape, he said: “We’ll be dead and buried and the drug problem will still be here.”

Cory Cronin’s advice to Taunton police is to stop ignoring the heroin addicts in favor of arresting dealers.

“The cops need to bust the junkies and keep busting them, because they will rat out the dealers,” he said.